DC power for large facilities such as mainframe computers or large communications equipment is customarily provided by a large number of individual power converters mounted in equipment racks or bays and connected in parallel. In one embodiment of such equipment bays, the DC outputs of the converters in a given bay are connected to a vertical bipolar bus, i.e., a pair of copper bars separated by an insulator that run vertically along one side of the bay.
Typically, equipment bays for power converters are mounted in cabinets and include a small dead space above and below the converter equipment that can be used for AC cabling. In bottom-cabled bays, the top dead space is empty; in top-cabled bays, the empty dead space is at the bottom.
In the prior art, the "hot" and ground DC buses of adjacent bays were individually connected by separate linking buses bolted to the DC buses of the bays. Because these linking buses had to be mounted one above the other in order to be accessible for installation, they did not fit into the cabling space and therefore took away the space for at least one converter.
As a facility grows, more bays have to be provided in order to power the additional equipment. In order to utilize all available equipment space, yet continue connecting all the bays in parallel, it is desirable to provide simple, high-current rigid links that do not take away any equipment space, reside within the cabinet's footprint, and can be easily installed. It is also desirable to be able to do the installation without interrupting power to the facility, i.e., on a live circuit.